Disguising Darwin’s Autobiography
In 1876, just a few years before his death, Charles Darwin jotted down a few recollections of his life. He mostly skipped over his biggest achievements, which were already well enough known. Instead, he focused on the development of his opinions and character, which made it much more fun to read. He barely touched on the writing of entire books but spent almost two pages describing his ingenious method for stealing fruit from trees as a child. (It was pretty clever.) So in these jottings, which eventually became his autobiography, you get a good look inside the private head of a man whose public work fundamentally changed what it means to be human. Darwin finished the book, stuck it in a drawer, watched his grandkids play for another six years, and then died at which point his son Francis began to think about what to do with the document. The choice may seem obvious at first: He’s Darwin after all, and this was his autobiography,so you publish it, right? But Francis had to deal with two knotty questions, and the answers to these questions weren’t obvious:
1. Did Dad want it published?
In the first pages of the manuscript, Darwin said he was writing because he thought it may interest his children and their children to read it. He’d have loved to have such a thing from his own grandfather, he wrote, even if it was "short and dull." So he decided to give his children and grandchildren a record of his own thoughts. But would he have wanted the rest of the world to see it?

2. If so, would he have wanted it all published?
Darwin included not just his scientific opinions, but also his religious ones or should I say his irreligious ones which were guaranteed to raise hackles if those opinions got out and started wandering the streets of Victorian England.

Most people familiar with the current cultural debate over evolution may think Darwin would have relished raising a hackle or three. But they don’t know Darwin. The man whose theory overturned the most cherished assumptions of the human race was actually a conflict-avoider of the first rank. After publishing On the Origin of Species, he retreated to his home to study orchids, leaving the pitched debate to friends like Thomas Huxley. Was this a man who’d want his religious opinions trotted out after his death? If I were Francis, I’m not sure what I’d have thought. When it came to religion, the path Darwin took was a really interesting one. He was so religious as a young man that he planned to be a minister. But a five-year voyage around the world as a naturalist on the Beagle brought a very different Darwin back to England. He put aside his plans for the ministry and gradually did the same with his supernatural beliefs. The Autobiography gives a full, personal account of his changing opinions. He decided in the end that the Old Testament was "manifestly false" and to be trusted no more than "the beliefs of any barbarian." He said that "fixed laws" and not divine will governed the world, and that all morality can be derived without reference to God. Disbelief crept over him slowly but was at last complete, he said, and he "never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct." Reading the manuscript after Charles’s death, his wife Emma a deeply religious Christian was worried about what would happen to his reputation if his views were known. Though there was no end to her penciled concerns, one passage especially troubled her. Charles wrote I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true, for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. Emmabracketed that passage and wrote in the margin I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published. It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief but very few now would call that ‘Christianity,’ (tho’ the words are there). In all, Emma marked up nearly 20 pages of the document for deletion, telling Francis that his father’s true religious views must not be made public. In some cases, her edits precisely reversed what Charles meant to say.If you read this I liked the thought of being a country clergyman . . . I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. . . . you’re likely to think Darwin remained a Christian. But the original passage told a different story: I liked the thought of being a country clergyman . . . I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible. At first Francis disagreed strongly with his mother’s wishes, and for five years after Charles’s death, the Darwin family nearly came to blows over it. They were on the verge of actually suing each other when Francis finally relented. He published his father’s Autobiography with his mother’s requested edits, leaving very little hint of Charles’s agnosticism. So if it didn’t end up in the published Autobiography, how do modern readers know his real views? For that, another member of the Darwin family deserves the thanks Nora Barlow, niece of Francis and granddaughter of Charles, who got her hands on the original in 1958, restored all the omitted passages and published Charles’s unabridged Autobiography for the first time with religious critiques and agnosticism intact. [/b]

Lying about the dying: Tales of deathbed conversion
Years after the death of Charles Darwin, a story emerged that the agnostic scientist converted to Christianity on his deathbed. That was to be expected the story I mean, not the conversion, which never happened. After a famous atheist or agnostic dies, or even a heretic or a member of a minority faith, you can hardly count to ten before someone somewhere claims that the person converted in the final moments. The supposed conversions always seem to occur, rather conveniently,with no one present but the dying person and the storyteller. Because it bolsters the faith of the faithful, and because the best material witness is no longer taking questions, many religious believers are quick to believe and spread such stories. Thomas Paine, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Thomas Edison, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Lennon, and countless others have been subjects of false deathbed conversion tales. For sheer nerve, though, it’s hard to beat the tale invented by Lady Elizabeth Hope. The British evangelist claimed in 1915 to have heard Charles Darwin renounce evolution and accept Jesus on his deathbed. Fortunately, several of those who were actually present during Darwin’s last days, including his daughter Henrietta and son Francis, were still alive in 1915 to denounce the fiction. “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue,” said Francis. “I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply.” Henrietta added, “I was present at his deathbed, Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier.” When the temptation arises to misrepresent a person’s religious views on his or her deathbed, the Ninth Commandment the one that prohibits bearing false witness is often the hardest to keep.
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Hearing Echoes of the Lost Sutras of Cārvāka[b]
Cārvāka was the name of one of the strongest schools of atheist materialism in ancient India. It burst into the conversation of that fascinating culture as early as the sixth century BCE. Cārvāka was one of the earliest philosophies to spend time working out the implications of materialism, a simple but powerful idea. Materialism is the idea that everything in the universe is made of matter or energy,or derives from them. Materialists don’t believe that souls, spirits, ghosts, deities, and any other nonmaterial entities you can think of are real. Disbelieving in ghosts and souls and such doesn’t mean that something like human consciousness isn’t real. It obviously is. Materialism just says it doesn’t have an existence independent of the matter that creates it a human brain. My consciousness my “me” results not from an immortal soul that can outlive my body,but from the natural activity of my material brain. Just as the music is over when the band stops playing, materialism says I will cease to be when my brain stops “playing” me into existence. I’m not thrilled about that idea, and I doubt the followers of Cārvāka were either. But as far as I can tell, none of us gets a vote, and I am as convinced as they were that it’s true. Like many Indian schools of thought, Cārvāka created little books called sūtras to sum up their point of view. A sūtra is a text that captures complex ideas in a collection of short, pithy sayings. Sutra-like texts from various cultures outside of India include:
1. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac
2. Mao’s Little Red Book
3. The Analects of Confucius
4. Even Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen The Bārhaspatya-sūtras captured the most important Cārvāka ideas. Written around the third century BCE, these sūtras have been lost except for a few fragments quoted in other (mostly unfriendly) sources. Many of those surviving bits criticize or contradict religious doctrines directly, saying
5. Religion is a human invention.
6. Nothing is wrong with sensual pleasure.
7. Death is the end of existence.
8. Direct experience is the only valid kind of evidence.
9. Hindu religious rituals are ignorant and unmanly.
The authors of the Vedas, the sacred books of Hinduism, are “buffoons, knaves, and demons.”

Given how forceful their criticisms of religion were, it’s not too surprising that the powers that be persecuted the followers of Cārvāka, or that most of their texts including the Bārhaspatya sūtras conveniently went missing.[/b]

Listening to Al-Razi on “Fraudulent” Muhammad
Sometimes the dividing line between a culture’s prized and hated books runs right down the middle of a single author. The tenth century Persian physician and philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi was just such an author, and On the Refutation of Revealed Religions is a book on the naughty side of the line. I can only imagine the confusion among friends and admirers of al-Razi. They couldn’t help loving his incredible contributions to science and medicine alleviating suffering, defining new disease treatments, isolating new compounds, showing endless compassion for the less fortunate, and saving countless lives. But I have to think there were some awkward silences when he called Muhammad a fraud and all religion a hoax. The same cloud of confusion befuddled the admirers of other famous religious doubters, from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Edison to Susan B. Anthony to Albert Einstein. Their cultures bent over backwards to celebrate their achievements without drawing any attention to their doubt. Al-Razi presented the very same challenge to his tenth century Islamic fans. On the Refutation of Revealed Religions dismantled the whole idea of prophecy,brick by rational brick, arguing among other things that it makes zero sense for Allah to give prophetic knowledge to a few rather than to everyone at once. Al-Razi encouraged a really fertile line of questioning: If you were God/Allah, would it make a lick of sense to do things the way they have been done? Most people take for granted the idea that the deity revealed truth through a few chosen prophets. Moses talked to a bush, Joseph Smith found golden plates, Muhammad talked to Gabriel, and Jesus talked . . . to himself, I guess. But when you put yourself in the Holy Loafers for just a minute, it starts to look like an odd way of doing things. It does make sense, though, as a way for a few ambitious folks with a healthy prophet motive to get things started. Not too many people have had the chance to follow al-Razi’s reasoning. Many of the more than 200 books he wrote have survived to be enshrined in the annals of Islamic history.But these stinging critiques of religion, for some reason, were misplaced along the way. [/b]

Discovering the First Explicitly Atheist Book Theophrastus Redivivus [b]
Sometime in the 1650s, just as the Scientific Revolution was breaking into a run, several copies of an anonymous book began circulating around Europe a book filled to the brim with forceful arguments against belief in God. Theophrastus redivivus started by declaring that every great philosopher in every age has been an atheist (whether he could openly admit it or not), that all religions are fictions, and that anyone claiming to have proof of the existence of a god is lying or mentally ill. That was just on the first page. The rest was a collection of arguments against belief by writers and thinkers through the ages a kind of freethought anthology and the first book-length work of atheist thought produced in Europe. Passed secretly from hand to hand and house to house, Theophrastus touched off a century of whispered discussions and arguments about the existence of God and spawned more than 200 anonymous pamphlets, essays, and handwritten books arguing against religious belief, known collectively as the clandestina. It’s hard to really get inside the mind of a person from the 17th century,to fully grasp how different the world looked before all those later centuries happened. Atheism wasn’t just a weird minority opinion at the time. For most people, it was completely unthinkable that God didn’t exist. A 17th-century understanding of science no matter what century a person actually lives in makes it bone-crushingly obvious that an intelligent designer created the world. As a result, atheism fascinated and repelled the 17th-century mind. Some people in the period even considered atheism to be evidence of serious mental illness. And you know what? If I were alive in the 17th century, before science began to really fill in the gaps, I’d probably have to agree. Around 1700, a different breed of atheist tract appeared, one that didn’t just collect atheist opinion from the past but made new and compelling arguments for atheism and against religious belief, including some informed by the new Scientific Revolution. The ball set rolling by Theophrastus was headed straight for the Age of Reason, knocking over the pins of superstition as it went. The impact of the clandestina was huge. Many of the main arguments and ideas of the Enlightenment started in these secret, anonymous documents. After centuries of religion arguing with itself through the Reformation and several religious wars, the very idea of religious belief was finally getting a sustained challenge. But unlike those religious wars, the atheist’s main weapons, then as now, were words, arguments, and ideas.[/b]

Making a Whispered Myth Real: The Treatise of the Three Impostors[b]
The rumor of a book that called Jesus a liar and fake, spoken in hushed voices, started as far back as the 13th century.Sure, it said the same about Moses and Muhammad but impugning the character of Jesus was the real attention-getter in medieval Europe. All the whisperers seemed to agree on the title of this rumored book The Treatiseof the Three Impostors as well as the basic thrust, that the three biggest prophets of all time were liars. But no one could agree on who wrote the mysterious thing. Some pointed to Averroes, a 12th-century Islamic overachiever in the al-Razi mold. Others even suggested Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who went to war with two Popes and famously refused to believe anything that reason couldn’t explain. (Red flag!) As the centuries rolled by, everyone with a reputation for religious skepticism joined the lineup of possible authors even if they were born centuries after the birth of the rumor. Funny thing, though: Even as the rumor passed from one generation to the next, nobody ever seemed to have seen the actual book. Then all at once, in the late 17th century, copies of The Treatiseof the Three Impostors were everywhere. Europe, already reeling from scores of secret manifestos challenging and ridiculing religious belief, suddenly had another shocker to deal with. And what a shocker it was! Religion, said the anonymous author, was born of ignorance and is full of “vain and ridiculous opinions.” Ideas of God are “silly,” and the clergy use those ideas to keep the common people in “deplorable blindness.” Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad were “impostors” who intentionally duped their followers with the equivalent of magic tricks. Even the existence of God was seriously doubtful. The smoldering embers of debate created by the earlier clandestina burst into a bonfire when this mythical manuscript suddenly came to life. But who wrote it? My money (and the money of most of the historians who’ve weighed in) is on John Toland,an Irish philosopher and satirist. Toland was in his 20s and expressing suspiciously rational opinions at the time the “ancient manuscript” suddenly appeared. He was among the first to claim that he’d found a copy I’m betting he was the very first which he quickly disseminated to philosopher friends. And within a decade, Tolandwas writing one treatise after another attacking Christianity and questioning every religious assumption he could get his hands on. If John Tolanddidn’t write Three Impostors, I’m the Pope. Within a few years of its sudden appearance, The Treatiseof the Three Impostors was the most widely read of the anonymous atheist documents coursing around Europe, setting the stage for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.[/b]

Expelling the Atheist: Shelley’s Necessity of Atheism
Even as late as the 19th century,blasphemy was still an actual, arrestable crime in England. Simply standing up in public and expressing the opinion that God didn’t exist could, and often did, get a person locked up. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was never one to hold back an opinion and despite the laws against blasphemy, this included his opinion that God was pretend. While an Oxford student in 1811, Shelley wrote a strongly worded and well-reasoned pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism,” printed up a few hundred copies, and quietly scattered them around the Oxford grounds. Just expressing an atheist opinion out loud was enough to set the wheels of British justice in motion at this time. But Shelley went beyond that, arguing (pretty convincingly, if you ask me) that atheism was a necessary position the only one that could be reasonably held. Shelley examined three types of evidence human senses, human reason, and the testimony of others dismantling each in turn as a valid foundation for belief. Having done so in under a thousand words, he concluded that atheism wasn’t just sound and reasonable, but the only real choice left standing. In his one act of caution (possibly ever), Shelley left his name off the pamphlet, signing only “An Atheist.” No one who knew Shelley was fooled by this act; between the mastery of language and the sheer cheeky nerve of it all, every finger pointed right at the 19-year-old poet. Within the week, he was hauled in front of the wall of frowns that was the Oxford Council of Deans. When one of the deans asked him point blank if he wrote the pamphlet, Shelley didn’t admit to it, but he didn’t deny it either. As a result, he was suspended from Oxford and sent home, furious. Percy and his father (a Member of Parliament without the slightest sense of humor) couldn’t stand each other, and this latest development made things much worse. Without Percy’s permission, the elder Shelley worked out a deal with Oxford to let his son back in. Just one condition Percy had to publicly renounce his atheism. Oh, fat chance, said Shelley,or probably something more poetic at which point he was permanently expelled from Oxford. This expulsion had such a devastating effect on his career that he was forced to settle for becoming one of the finest poets in the history of the English language. [/b]

Censoring Himself . . . for A while: Mark Twain
After an autobiography is finished, it’s pretty odd for the author to wait very long to release it. After a lifetime at the mercy of the press and biographers, most public figures are eager for the chance to tell their stories in their own words. But sometimes, concerns about the reaction to their opinions outweigh that eagerness. Such was the case with Mark Twain. Twain’s concern about revealing his own anti-religious opinions led him to hold back much of his later writing from publication, including some stinging anti-religious commentary. “I expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions,” he wrote in his final years, “and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones.” As he evolved through his life from practicing Presbyterian to mild Deist to an increasingly sharp religious critic, Twain’s writings begin to show a deepening disgust with religion. His complete Autobiography is thought to include some of his most direct anti-religious views. I say it’s “thought to” include them because I haven’t read his complete Autobiography yet. That’s not because I don’t have a library card, but because Twain specified that only an abridged version “trimmed and perfumed,” you may say be released upon his death. He then gave instructions (in a Preface titled “As from the Grave”) for new editions to be released every 25 years, each with a little more material: From the first, second, third, and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out. There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see . . . The editions should be issued twenty-five years apart. Many things that must be left out of the first will be proper for the second; many things that must be left out of both will be proper for the third; into the fourth or at least the fifth the whole Autobiography can go, unexpurgated. At this writing, the century mark has finally passed, though only one of three volumes has so far seen the light of day. But even that is enough to get a good taste of the uncensored Twain to come. Here’s a passage: There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. [/b]

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AnonyNymous:
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I honestly don't know how you do it Op, but repect!